Patreon Acquires Artist Subscription Competitor Subbable

Patreon Acquires Artist Subscription Competitor Subbable

Patreon co-founder Jack Conte had a feeling that his company might someday join forces withSubbable, which is another subscription-based funding site for artists. That’s exactly what happened today. Subabble co-founders and YouTube sensations Hank and John Green joined the Patreon family, along with 24 creators that use Subbable’s platform.

Subbable was founded by the Green brothers in 2013, just a few months after Patreon went live. Both had the same goal of funding podcasters, YouTube stars and other types of content creators.

Conte and the Green brothers have been open supporters of each other’s goals since the beginning. Hank was even on the Patreon advisory board and there had been talk about joining forces before. But talk was just that until Amazon announced its Flexible Payments Service, the payments platform Subbable used, would be shutting down at the beginning of June.

This change meant Subbable would have to go through a major overhaul and ask each one of their contributors to run through the payments process on the site all over again. Subabble worried that ask would mean losing a lot of subscribers.

I also have a huge creator crush on the Vlogbrothers

— Jack Conte, Patreon

Conte saw this as an opportunity to woo two major YouTube stars over to Patreon. The Green brothers started the popular Vlogbrothers YouTube channel. That channel and its 9 subsidiary shows has over 2.5 million subscribers. The Vlogbrothers shows SciShow and CrashCourse have had over 467 million views combined. Hank also runs VidCon, an annual online video conference that nets over 18,000 attendees each year.

While those subscribers, viewers and attendees won’t necessarily translate into paying customers for Patreon, Conte said he believes the Green brothers add an intrinsic value to his company.

“I also have a huge creator crush on the Vlogbrothers, so I couldn’t be happier today,” Conte added.

John will join his brother Hank on the Patreon board of advisors and Patreon will on-board the brothers’ two most popular shows, SciShow and CrashCourse onto the Patreon platform.

The amount of the acquisition was not shared. However, Conte did say that the bulk of acquisition money will go into a 40 day matching program for the Subabble creators. This means that Patreon will match the contributions of any of the old Subabble subscribers who pledge to the Subbable creators that are now on Patreon, up to $100,000.